GAFFNEY: The real reason behind Benghazigate

 

Was Benghazi the base from which Team Obama was funneling arms to Jihads seeking to overthrow Syria and establish another radical Islamist State?  Suddenly Ambassador Stevens presence there and his meeting with a Turkish diplomat begins to make sense.

 

Was Obama gun-walking arms to jihadists?

Thanks to intrepid investigative reporting — notably by Bret Baier and Catherine Herridge at Fox News, Aaron Klein at WND.com and Clare Lopez at RadicalIslam.org — and information developed by congressional investigators, the mystery is beginning to unravel with regard to what happened that night and the reason for the subsequent, clumsy official cover-up now known as Benghazigate.

The evidence suggests that the Obama administration has not simply been engaging, legitimating, enriching and emboldening Islamists who have taken over or are ascendant in much of the Middle East. Starting in March 2011, when American diplomat J. Christopher Stevens was designated the liaison to the “opposition” in Libya, the Obama administration has been arming them, including jihadists like Abdelhakim Belhadj, leader of the al Qaeda franchise known as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

Once Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown, Stevens was appointed ambassador to the new Libya run by Mr. Belhadj and his friends. Not surprisingly, one of the most important priorities for someone in that position would be to try to find and secure the immense amount of armaments that had been cached by the dictator around the country and systematically looted during and after the revolution.

Investigative journalist Aaron Klein has reported that the “consulate in Benghazi” actually was no such thing. He observes that although administration officials have done nothing to correct that oft-repeated characterization of the facility where the murderous attack on Stevens and his colleagues was launched, they call it a “mission.” What Mr. Klein describes as a “shabby, nondescript building” that lacked any “major public security presence” was, according to an unnamed Middle Eastern security official, “routinely used by Stevens and others to coordinate with the Turkish, Saudi and Qatari governments on supporting the insurgencies in the Middle East, most prominently the rebels opposing Assad’s regime in Syria.”

We know that Stevens‘ last official act was to hold such a meeting with an unidentified “Turkish diplomat.” Presumably, the conversation involved additional arms shipments to al Qaeda and its allies in Syria. It also may have involved getting more jihadi fighters there. After all, Mr. Klein reported last month that, according to sources in Egyptian security, our ambassador was playing a “central role in recruiting jihadists to fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.”

It gets worse. Last week, Center for Security Policy senior fellow and former career CIA officer Clare Lopez observed that there were two large warehouse-type buildings associated with the so-called “consulate” whose purpose has yet to be disclosed. As their contents were raided in the course of the attack, we may never know for sure whether they housed — and were known by the local jihadis to house — arms, perhaps administered by the two former Navy SEALs killed along with Stevens.

Read the whole thing.

It's also part of a pattern that's emerging about Obama's policies in the Middle East.  Note that all of countries that have experienced the so-called "Arab Spring" have produced radical Islamist leaders.  Which leads to a common question when you see the results of the Obama policies: are the policies failures or are they deliberately designed to do what they have done?  Some have asked this about Obama's domestic "failures" and now it's worth asking about the destruction of American interests overseas.

It also leads to another interesting question: what group is actually responsible for the attack? The Islamists who were getting the weapons don't have an obvious motive for the attack. Syria's Assad regime would benefit from the destruction of the Benghazi compound. We won’t get a truthful answer if Obama is re-elected, and a Romney administration may not want to open that can of worms.

UPDATE:  This could also explain why the CIA and the State Department are both willing to fall on their swords and claim that the attack was all about a You Tube video.  The discussion about who knew what and when they knew it diverts attention from alternative reason behind the attack.  Once you eliminate the video as the spark that led to the attack you are left with no stated motive.  The default motive: that Jihadists don't like us and would attack us, just as they would any enemy, is plausible on the surface, ... but under closer scrutiny doesn't pass the smell test.